Monotasking in word processing

Written as comment reply to an interesting blog post.

In Windows, the once built-in Windows WordPad would qualify as a no-frills program, but it itself doesn't prevent notifications in Windows. WordPad was available until Windows 11 v. 23H2 (incl.). Windows 11 24H2 will remove WordPad upon install.

Then Microsoft once released Word for DOS 5.5 for free as part of its Y2K effort, but it's probably legal only on owning a Word for DOS license, which for version 5.5/6.0 cost $450 around the time of their release (1990, 1993, I can't tell which year).

Unfortunately, Word for DOS only supports FAT16, requiring wait times for modern Windows to convert filenames from FAT32. Neither does it support long filenames.

File format conversion is also tricky, but the RTF format is universal. The next-best proprietary option is/was Microsoft Works, which was a more affordable no-frills suite of business software that could do most things, but not to the extent of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Works was also available for DOS.

Windows 7 is the last consumer version of Windows to support classic themes and their customisation. But it's out of date.

Curiously, the default interface of Windows 8, which was developed with tablet computers in mind, is more aligned towards monotasking.

The next-best option is LibreOffice. It has full-screen editing with Shift+Ctrl+J.

Until version 24.8 (incl.), LibreOffice retains the possibility to theme the internal document view via

Tools > Options > Application Colors.

There, a user can edit the current theme, such as colours of all elements, including background colour and text, and save it as new with a custom name. This does no affect the toolbar and other UI background colours.

This release of LibreOffice has also attained good dark mode support:

In Tools > Options > View > pick Appearance mode as Dark.

In upscaled displays (150% in HD monitors), the best icon themes are marked "SVG + dark". That way, the lines in icons will look smoother.

From LibreOffice 25.2 on, application colors for document/file view can no longer be user-customised.

Unfortunately, this change was done in the name of 'unifying' the user interface around theming, and an extension system was recommended as a replacement.

Previous major LibreOffice releases have support for system dark mode, background themes (images) for the toolbar (including custom themes from Firefox Personas between LO 4.0–6.2, so long as the Firefox Personas website was up), and customisation of the document view.